Dear List,
I recently got the chance to interview Jon Peck of SPSS Inc, a pioneering
technical statistician working since 1983 (when there were only two
substantial statistical software companies as per him ;)  (not anymore ;)
and currently he is a Principal Software Engineer and Technical Advisor at
SPSS.

Jon talks of SPSS Inc's involvement with the Open Source, of scripting
languages ,Python and a bit of  R.

The article is also online at my blog and at
http://smartdatacollective.com/Home/17206

Regards,

Ajay

Here is an extract "

*Ajay- What are SPSS’s contribution to Open Source software . What ,if you
can disclose are any plans for further increasing that involvement.*

*Jon-*  I wish I could talk about SPSS future plans, but I can’t.  However,
the company is committed to continuing its efforts in Python and R.  By
opening up the SPSS technology with these open source technologies, we are
able to expand what we and our users can do.  At the same time, we can make
R more attractive through nicer output and simpler syntax and taking away
much of the pain.  One of the things I love about this approach is how
quickly and easily new things can be produced and distributed this way
compared to the traditional development cycle.  I wrote about productivity
and Python recently on my blog at insideout.spss.com.

*Ajay - How happy is the SPSS developer community with Python . Are there
any other languages that you are considering in the future.*

*Jon-* Many in the SPSS user community were more used to packaged procedures
than to programming (except in the area of data transformations).  So
Python, first, and then R were a shock.  But the benefits are so large that
we have had an excellent response to both the Python and R technologies.
Some have mastered the technology and have been very successful and have
made contributions back to the SPSS community.  Others are consumers of this
technology, especially through our custom dialogs and extension commands
that eliminate the need to learn Python or R in order to use programs in
these languages. "

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